Remembering the Original It Girl, Clara Bow, on Her Birthday

Next year, 113 years after her July 29, 1905, birthday, moviegoing audiences will get reacquainted with the actress Clara Bow. Courtney Love narrated a 1999 documentary about the scrappy Brooklyn-born star, and Bérénice Bejo is said to have channeled Bow for her Oscar-nominated performance in The Artist. Who will play Bow in the upcoming biopic has yet to be announced, but she’ll have to possess lots of chutzpah—and “It.”

When Bow was growing up on and near Brooklyn’s Bergen Street, it wasn’t the leafy urban Eden inhabited by hipsters it is now. For the dysfunctional Bow family (the actress was abused by her alcoholic father and threatened with death by her schizophrenic mother), it was a sort of circle of hell. “I never had any clothes,” Bow once candidly recalled. “And lots of time didn’t have anything to eat. We just lived, that’s about all.” Still, like the proverbial tree that grew in Brooklyn, Bow persevered. Her ticket out was a “Fame and Fortune” acting contest, which she won in 1921. Bow wasn’t handed a golden ticket or a free ride, though. She fought for auditions and roles, and she worked hard: In roughly a decade-long span, she appeared in 57 films—46 silent and 11 talkies.

Physically, the petite Bow was known for her mop-top bob, “Cupid’s bow” lips, and huge and expressive Betty Boop eyes. “How she vamps with her lamps,” once wrote Variety of the actress who was one of the inspirations for the cartoon character. Yes, Bow was a cutie, but it wasn’t just her appearance that made her box-office gold. It was her sense of fun. A need for escape, a kinetic energy: “She danced even when her feet were not moving,” crowed Paramount’s Adolph Zukor. In 1927 that special something was given a name: “It.” It was the title of a starring vehicle for Bow (she plays a poor shop girl who wins the heart of her wealthy boss) written by Elinor Glyn, a British writer of piquant romances (who inspired a ditty that begins: “Would you like to sin / With Elinor Glyn / On a tiger skin”). “It” is often understood to mean sex appeal, but it’s a slippier, more complex quality than that.

Bow was, however, a consummate flirt. Married once to Rex Bell, a cowboy on film who became Lieutenant Governor of Nevada, she counted Gary Cooper among her lovers and seemed to have no equal when it came to breaking off engagements. “Gosh, he was too subtle. I couldn’t live up to his subtlety,” was one gem of a kiss-off, as was this: “I cannot marry Harry Richman as I am expecting a nervous breakdown.” Sadly, Bow would indeed inherit her mother’s psychological affliction, but that would come later, after she had made her mark as filmdom’s quintessential flapper and jazz baby par excellence. “Only 20th-century America could have produced [the type],” wrote Cecil Beaton in Vogue, where he described the roaring ’20s as an “age of diminutive and slightly comic little blondes and brunettes, like the pertest ventriloquist dolls, irresistible, attractive.”

Fleet of feet and moving to a madcap rhythm, Bow and her fellow flappers weren’t always light of heart. Innocence was a casualty of the First World War and tragedy lurked in the corners of Bow’s life. “All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there’s a feeling of tragedy underneath,” Bow once remarked. “She’s unhappy and disillusioned, and that’s what people sense.” This awareness, based on experience, gave Bow’s sparkling performances a naturalness that audiences could relate to, and guaranteed filled theaters. “She was the ’20s,” pronounced Louise Brooks, another icon of that heady time. “In my era,” Bow said in a 1951 interview, “we had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. I’d whiz down Sunset Boulevard in my open Kissel . . . with seven red chow dogs to match my hair.” Bow might not have had polish, but boy, did she have flair. As Vogue once put it: “There were shoals of It girls, but Clara Bow was It.”